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Turnkey workstations in a commodity era

I am on bit of a roll here, going outside my usual safe topic comfort zone.

Nothing against TimeLogic, but tell me why I would purchase something like the CodeQuest workstation? From the product description page

The CodeQuestâ„¢ workstation combines optimized algorithms, powerful hardware acceleration, and PipeWorksâ„¢ visual workflow software to drive your genome exploration and drug discovery research. CodeQuest is an effective solution for bioinformatics experts and novices alike. You can build and process genomic analyses without tedious scripting, achieve compute-cluster performance, all in a desktop solution that can be shared by the entire lab.

Turnkey solutions have never worked in the life sciences (I can’t think of a single successful example), and in a world where I can pick and choose between accelerators, hardware, pipelining/workflow tools and applications, there is even less need of one. In the end it’s about flexibility as much as cost and even cost is relative. What if I want to add on an app that is cluster only or better suited to that kind of deployment? I still need a cluster, so the workstation becomes an extra cost.

Just a long weekend rant. Feel free to tell me that I am an idiot.

Further reading:
“Accelerated Computing” – The floodgates
Blasting FPGAs

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